


terrible aspects of the eye

by benjaminschiffplatt



Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Missing Scene, and yeah they both talk a little stilted and formally but hey theyre poetic as shit, as well as unnecessarily poetic comparisons of the kaiju blue and the drift, emotionally inept boys who deserve to be friends goddamnit, lots of mentions of the drift and of nightmares, mako shows up for a split second, mentions of newt/herms if you squint but like dude you already know theyre in love so, they talk and relate to one another mostly
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-06
Updated: 2018-04-06
Packaged: 2019-04-19 04:45:02
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,014
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14229558
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/benjaminschiffplatt/pseuds/benjaminschiffplatt
Summary: “If I remember right, we stopped the world from ending.”“I cannot say it feels that way.”"I think I know what you mean."A beat of silence, and Hermann asks his question, the one about drifting, the one that Raleigh is dreading.





	terrible aspects of the eye

**Author's Note:**

> very short, very unedited, title very stolen and paraphrased from shakespeare's king henry

The breach has been closed. The neverending stream of alcohol and relief driven parties seems to have stopped, or at least, have been paused by Marshall Hansen for long enough to pack as much of the Shatterdome as possible in the scant few hours whatever is left of the PPDC has to still call itself the PPDC. As it turns out, heroes of the apocalypse have a much more difficult time wriggling themselves out of work than one might expect, but Raleigh Becket has managed to step away from his duties for long enough to find an empty spot in the Shatterdome, in a J-Tech room used for repairing drive suits and neural load transmitters.

This is the last place he expects to run into Dr. Hermann Gottlieb, two floors and half the length of a typical football field away from the K-Sci labs.

“Doc?” he says, hesitant as he steps fully into the room, “Don’t suppose you got lost, did you?” he tries to joke but falls flat when Dr. Gottlieb only glances at him in response before resuming what can only be described as a staring contest with one of the headsets that looks so painfully like the ones installed in Gypsy Danger. If Raleigh had a guess, he’d say that the doctor had a pretty good chance of winning before he interrupted.

Still nervous, and maybe a little weary (or does he mean wary? It’s been so long since he’s used the word, if ever), he sits down on a bench opposite Gottlieb’s current position. The pair sit in abject silence for a long while, the minutes passing with the far away sounds of crew members clanging tools and setting boxes on top of one another tunneling down the corridors. Raleigh thinks, harder and deeper than Hansen has allowed him to in the past few days, or Mako for that matter. The days of celebration and organization fade away and his thoughts, his emotions, his experiences, they all come drifting back to him in a wave of seconds. He almost forgets that the mathematician is even sitting with him until a distinctly English accent interrupts his thoughts.

“I don’t suppose you could spare a moment to answer me a question, could you? About… well, about the drifting?” he sounds like he’s been sitting on his words for a while, voice shaky and uncertain. Raleigh knows the question is mostly for politeness’ sake, that if he were a lesser man he might be able to weasel his way from the conversation, but he isn’t that lesser man, and he feels like if he left this doctor to his own devices, something terrible may come, and he can’t let that sit on his conscience.

“Of course, Dr. Gottlieb,” he says, bracing himself for some question he’s heard a million times from someone curious about the Jaeger pilots.

“Do call me Hermann, please,” the doctor responds, something so out of character that Raleigh is jarred momentarily, “It feels so unnecessarily formal after the end of the world.”

“If I remember right, we stopped the world from ending.”

“I cannot say it feels that way.”

His words surprise Raleigh for the second time in less than sixty seconds. A nagging in the back of his brain reminds him of what the doctors went through to help stop the kaiju, and suddenly he feels guilty for ever comparing Gottlieb, no, Hermann, to the common interviewer, even if only in his head.

“I think I know what you mean,” Raleigh says, trying not to be seen as shaken by the accuracy of Hermann’s statement, though he felt the words reverberate in his bones, a chill slipping down his spine the way cold water drips down the side of frozen icicles left to melt away in the winter sun.

A beat of silence, and then Hermann asks his question, the one about drifting, the one that has Raleigh both so intrigued all of a sudden and very, very afraid of what it might be. He crosses his fingers next to his thigh where Hermann might not see and hopes that he won’t have to return to Marshall Hansen with eyes rimmed in red. 

“Do you ever… forget?” Hermann shakes his head, lips pursing as he thinks carefully through his words, “I don’t think that’s quite the right word for it. A misremembering of sorts, perhaps.”

“I don’t think there is a word for it, not really,” Raleigh is quiet, contemplative in his quest to validate the doctor. He, too, struggles to convey what he means to a man he knows next to nothing about, but he knows that this moment is important. He knows that whatever he says, however he says it, will be something that may affect Hermann in any direction, in any capacity. He hopes that he’s successful.

“The- the zoning out,” Hermann tries to continue, almost tripping over himself trying to get the thoughts out. Despite their limited interactions, Raleigh can tell that he isn’t usually this ineloquent and senses the man’s discomfort.

“The zoning out, the zoning in,” Raleigh interrupts, hoping to prevent Hermann from giving himself a hemorrhage in trying to speak, “The focusing on whatever lies between you and whoever you’re connected to. There’s that space, this moment of time where nothing is there. I heard someone call it the Black once, but I don’t think that’s quite right. It’s not black at all.”

“It’s blue,” Hermann whispers, and Raleigh grants him a small smile, just the tiniest fraction of an upturn of his lips. For the first time since they sat down together, Raleigh realizes that _he gets it_ , that Hermann may have only drifted once in his life, but he still drifted, not only with another person but with a _kaiju_ , and all at once admiration hits him in waves. This stuffy Oxford man isn’t only smart, but he’s brave, too, and Raleigh is terribly impressed.

“It’s so extraordinarily blue,” Hermann says, his voice still low, “The kaiju have their toxic agent, the blood, the terrible, royal blue that leaks and kills; it’s only right we should have made our own. The shade a ghost might be. I suppose it feels right that the thing that clambors over our past and into our futures might be that shade of ghostly, ghastly blue.”

His hushed reverence is quite poetic for a man who once claimed that _politics, poetry, promises- **those** are lies_ and that his equations, the very handwriting of god in his own chalk-covered palms, would be the ultimate savior of humankind. He was, of course, correct in his assumptions that his numbers would be vital in the damning of the apocalypse, but now he sits on a bench in an abandoned sector of the once-revered Hong Kong Shatterdome, only miles away from the breach, now left in a state of uncertainty as stolen thoughts of biology and mismatched pasts chase each other around his mind and memory. Raleigh is stunned into silence, though he knows exactly what the doctor means by his almost lyrical monologue.

“It’s the not knowing, not knowing if it’s your own memory, or hers, or his,” Raleigh adds after a moment of reverent silence, allowing himself to speak more in one sitting than he has to anyone in a very long time, “There’s something about losing something of yourself in the drift, losing it to the drift. Losing a part of yourself, your impression of yourself, your past. There’s so much I lost when I lost Yancy, things I’ll never get back. Some of those things are memories. Things I can’t remember but they sit in the back of my mind, quiet, waiting for me. But I just… I can’t remember.”

“I don’t know what it’s like to chase the rabbit, per say,” Hermann glances at Raleigh nervously, wanting so desperately to express his turmoil without offending the only other person in the building, in the country, the continent, even, with shared life experience, save for the man who has literally been burrowed into his brain already. But Raleigh’s expression is even, open, ready to hear what Hermann needs to say. So he continues, “But the rabbit, the memories, they run from me nonetheless, zigging and zagging in the empty spaces between him and I, in the nothingness. I can’t bear to tell him about the nightmares, he doesn’t deserve my nightmares on top of his own, and I can feel it, I can feel his dreams in the dark and they shake me awake, but I don’t know if it’s me or the phantom traces of the drift.”

His voice is cracking and shaking, and something tells Raleigh that he doesn’t know that there are tears welling in his eyes, rolling over themselves in a race to slide down his cheeks, bumping into one another from behind, splashing into infinitesimal puddles on the collar of his sweater, marking the grey fabric with an ever-growing dot of darkness. Raleigh leans forward on his bench and reaches a hand out, places it on Hermann’s knee, awkward yet comforting in its presence.

“You’ll find yourself again. I’ve never, I mean, I don’t know. I never drifted the way you did, but I know unconventional. It’s hard, the memories are hard to shake, even harder to call back to the ones you find missing. Some moments are easier than others, though, and one day, you’ll pick yourself up and be fine. You’ll never be the same, but some things weren’t meant to stay. Some people need to change,” Raleigh considers, almost speaking to himself now, “Some people need to change so they can grow. And I believe you can grow from this. From him.”

Raleigh’s throat is beginning to hurt. He’s never spoken this much to someone, especially not so deeply, so emotionally driven. He’s never really needed to, but when Hermann looks up at him through tear brimmed eyes, lips pursed in the hopeful grimace of someone trying to hold themself together, he knows it was worth it, and he knows that he’s right. If anyone can drift with a kaiju and Newton Geiszler at the same time and then pick themself up off the metaphorical floor, it would be Dr. Gottlieb.

The man in question nods, and seems to realize how close he is to Raleigh at the same time Raleigh does. He leans back, dabs at the corners of his red rimmed eyes with the sleeve of his sweater, and wraps his long, knobby fingers around the top of his cane. Raleigh pulls his hand away from the doctor’s knee and stands. He smiles stiffly at his new-found comrade as he steps over to the still-open door.

“Talk to Dr. Geiszler,” he says, “You guys… You’ll be alright. And Mako and I are just around the corner.”

“Thank you,” Hermann says, voice less shaky but just as gentle as before, a softer expression gracing his face than Raleigh had ever seen. He’s still sitting on the bench when Raleigh steps into the hallway and walks back down to the mess hall, where it appears Tendo has convinced Hansen and Mako to take a break for lunch between shipping boxes of Jaeger tech to other sites. He sits down at the end of a table with them and some of the J-Techs, staring silently at the dull metal table as he reflects on his past few minutes.

Mako nudges his arm with her shoulder and he glances over to her quickly, clearly forgetting that she was there in his intent focus on his thoughts. She takes his hand in hers and turns it palm up, and in it, she places the apple from her tray. It’s red and a little overripe, but fresher than Raleigh has seen in too long a time. He smiles at her and she smiles back at him and closes her fingers over the fruit, fingertips lingering on Raleigh’s knuckles where they both hold onto the fruit.

“An apple for the teacher,” she says wryly, and Raleigh can’t help but to laugh.


End file.
